First of all the taxes in Germany are quite a bit higher than ours. Second, we Americans are corrupt to the bone, and most of the costs in the things you mention go into greedy pockets, as opposed to actually delivering the services. This is because we've decided that it should cost insane amounts of money to get elected, therefore requiring that politicians raise exorbitant sums of money. Once they get elected, they write laws that benefit the people who gave them money, which in any other system would be considered a crime, but not here!
One party just lies about everything. They claim they care so much about the poor and downtrodden, but in reality they are greedy and corrupt beyond belief and do the exact opposite once elected. The other party doesn't hide the fact that they suck up to big business, but claim they are the party of small government, and when they get elected they do the exact opposite. The people wanting to clean the system up, they are declared radical, ignorant, dangerous terrorists - by both sides. Of course the majority of us actually want the system cleaned up, but we are gullible folk over here, and are easily distracted.
And there is a large number of people who have given up, don't give a shit, and are just trying to get by. They only come out and vote if they are really pissed off, and when that happens we get "change" which always turns out to not be change at all....
I absolutely agree, but as the owner of a development company that listens to start up entrepreneur pitches this is not a plan for everybody.
There is a huge freelance market place for responsible, hard working, decent honest folk. I'll never have a "real job" again, ever, and I make more money now than I ever made working for someone else.
There's a fantasy out there that there is VC money flowing like water for every Internet based idea. There isn't. But services, so many of the independent contractors are really flaky, there is a huge opportunity... in every market.
The way funding works in the new world as cemented by Citizen's United (Which benefited both Democrats and Republicans equally despite the wailing from the Democrats) is something like this:
Hello Mega-Evil-Corp? This is your friendly neighborhood party apparatchik. I'm prepared to offer you an exorbitant sum of the people's money, but you have to agree to "donate" a percentage of that money to our favorite super-pac. Don't worry, we fixed it so nobody can ever know! Mega-Evil-Corp does a financial analysis, and if the numbers look good, they accept. Next, the Party's central command pays some high dollar PR agency on K Street to craft the spin, and then an executive decision is made as to which lie, er, messaging will be used to sell this latest money laundering and/or vote buying scheme. The groundswell contingent gets their talking points, and they flood the comment sections of the news sites, the lies are honed and turned into heart tugging stories, and if it's a lot of money a fake crisis is precipitated behind the scenes. And then the money flows, the votes get bought, the wheels of the engine spin. Everybody makes out like a bandit except for YOU, the taxpayer, you get screwed beyond screwing. When it's all said and done, a few years later, the numbers come in and the whole thing was a colossal boondoggle, but this is quickly swept under the rug and nobody wants to talk about it anyway.
So one of the early actions of the greediest administration yet was to "privatize" space exploration. Wonder why? I just explained it to you. It's win win for everybody, the wheel of blame is off the government (Right: Look! That thing blew up! This proves big government doesn't work!). The wheel of blame is entirely on the private sector, which DUH benefits the left they cut the deals initially and just look who they picked to be the winners, certainly not evil Rethugnican companies DUH. If it fails, they can swoop in and use the crisis to great an even more giant theft engine, and if it doesn't, they can steal taxpayer money using PAC donations. It is so win win - and as usual science, technology, the advancement of the species, well who gives a shit about that when there is money to be made!!!
This is how ALL the schemes work, and have always worked, be it HealthCare, the Environment, Alternative Energy, Fracking, Drilling, Military Spending, Roads, Bridges, Infrastructure, Education, Public works projects, the border fence, you name it. So keep arguing stupid ideology folks, and pretend that your thieving party is so superior to the other thieving party, that's exactly what they want you to do... What I am describing is how the real world works, whether you like it or not, there's more truth to what I am saying than fiction.
But this isn't what happens at all. In the real world governments steal from one program to pay for another one that stands a greater chance of getting today's politician elected. So they drive the payments to providers to the lowest possible level, resulting in all customers getting the absolute lowest level of service. Corporations are beholden to their stockholders. So they offer different levels of service at different prices, because that's what the market wants, but at the end of the day they have to make a profit (e.g. provide an adequate return on the investment made by the stockholders) or they go under.
In the real world government is all about grabbing the maximum amount of money to buy the most votes for the party in power, because they want to stay there. Which is why the other party is ALWAYS portrayed as evil beyond evil. So of course they want you to believe that the competition is heartless and evil, duh. Corporations are not inherently evil, but they are far more predictable...
What you have do is not be swayed by the emotion targeted marketing that both groups use against ignorant people with great effectiveness. Politics is sales and marketing, they are one and the same. To pretend that one form of sales and marketing is evil, and one is benevolent, is very naive...
I was completely with you until you implied there's a distinction between the hackers and Harry the scumbag CEO. Hacking itself has become a business.
How do I know this?
Because we run a farm of web servers, and because we're small we take on all kinds of clients. Some of them have politically sensitive and/or controversial content. And no, we don't host porn sites. Anyway, a few of these sites have come under attack that is clearly the work of a human, not a robot. Given the time they invested, and some of the real time fights we had with them, these folks are clearly getting paid, nobody spends days and days harassing a web site across a dozen or more proxy servers just for fun.
As to marketing weasels being scumbags, yeah, but they are a necessary evil, no sales, no paycheck, no time to post on slashdot, ya know?
You make very good points. I believe there are additional aspects to this - There is a shrinking quantity of leisure time, combined with new perceptions of how one should spend it.
I started working in 1979. One got up, went to work, put in an eight, nine hour day and that was it. The only time you ever got called from work after hours was if the office was unexpectedly closed the next day. A very few, very important people had "pagers", and sure, the owner/senior management were taking client calls at all hours, but 97% of the workforce actually stopped working at 5:00. This is no longer the case for any position above store clerk, or mechanic. The expectation now is that work is the center of your life, and that you are always available. In those days workers were partly defined by their career and partly by their hobbies. Today, it's all about the career.
It used to be that building something in one's garage, restoring an old something, working on some artful thing - these were prized leisure activities. These activities were celebrated in the media, and on TV shows. While plenty of people still do these things, popular media says you should be always striving to better yourself - and that if you're not doing this, you should feel terribly guilty You should be working out, donating your free time to the soup kitchen, growing your own organic food, or something really huge like climbing half dome using one arm. That's whats celebrated by the media now. So being in one's garage building a boat or restoring a car, why that's selfish! So no wonder if you survey people, they are going to say "Oh yes, I spend my free time helping poor people and protesting the evils of capitalism" as opposed to what they probably really do...Play Video games, get stoned, watch TV....
To the article's point I believe it's hogwash, I know plenty of young folks, some of them aren't mechanical and some aren't. That's the way it always has been.
Virtual file system support to Linux boxes with Windows (server or client) is HORRIBLE, sure they claim to support WebDAV but as one who has tried it it falls apart the second the files are large, and the servers are not on the same intranet. I think they do this on purpose to sell SharePoint which is, of course ShareCraptastik.
MS can't even create a decent FTP client, which is pretty absurd when you think about it.
A foreign born non U.S. citizen can open a U.S. bank account without any problems at all, they just have to show up in person to do it. They can get a debit card issued against that account, no problem at all. The only bank that I am aware of that refuses to do this on a regular basis is CHASE but that's because of operation chokepoint (and Chase's participation in it).
It's much, much harder to get a credit card because of how charge back protection works. But what's wrong with a debit card? Nothing....
The daily climate clickbait has the normal count - close to 500 posts - all the same people, making the same arguments.
God God Slashdot is the CPI revenue that fucking important that you have to run this crap every 2 days?? Color me sick to death of it. So let's run a pro Obama Care story tomorrow (500 posts assured), followed by some "Corporations are Evil" story (500 posts assured), outsourcing I.T. jobs (500 posts, assured), followed by the ever popular "My I.T. manager is a clueless dolt" (500 posts every time)......
That was the office I started working in as a programmer in 1979. No kidding. What's left of of the picture are the 12" ashtrays and the brown walls, because ALL programmers smoked, every single one of them. One had a lot of time on their hands waiting for compiles, editor saves, 'n such in those days.
I hear what you are saying, I really do. But as a developer turned manager part of the reason things end up so black and white is because as a manager what you basically do is field complaints from the users (clients, other departments, your bosses) and the development staff day in and day out, day after day, endlessly. And life becomes, essentially, a constant stream of fuck ups, dumb mistakes, omissions. Because when things go well, managers aren't needed.
After a while you realize that you can't please everybody, no matter what, and that is how you end up with so much black and white.
For example... five of the twenty developers that work for you bitch and complain that their changes keep getting over-written when source code forks merge.. When the real problem is that they aren't good source control users and are too lazy to get a fresh copy... or commit. Or they click "auto merge" and never bother to pull the auto-merged code back down and see that it works. Five other guys complain about the first five... Your boss goes ballistic every time there's a new release because old bugs come back. After a while you get sick of the endless complaining. So you decide that the real problem is the developers aren't talking to each other, so you end up with the "daily tactical merge meeting" which is seen by the really good developers as a stupid waste of time.... And then people don't show up, in a childish act of rebellion... and you have to make it "mandatory". This is what it's like on the dark side... I do try really hard NOT to be the PHB I always seemed to work for as a developer but sometimes I do find myself acting like one.
As to the work space layout I do believe the low height cube walls are a huge mistake for most environments but I do see them more and more - and it's better than everybody having desks lined up in rows, which is what we had when I first started working a very long time ago.
I hear ya. The thing is, Exchange Server is pretty slick, it does things that IMAP doesn't. It's the suck-ass bloatware that is the client that's the issue...
For example I have a desktop, a laptop I take to meetings, and an iPad. IMAP can synch the inbox... Exchange synchs the sent items folder. Which is really useful... if you're 100 miles from your desktop and needing to find an email you sent this morning while in the office.
Although I think Outlook's main selling point is that Lotus notes sucks even more LOL. Gmail's OK except that I use open windows email as my task list sometimes...
Microsoft basically had two profitable divisions windows and office.
Largest clients for Microsoft are the U.S. Military and the Fortune 100. They have serviced these clients quite well. To claim they have made ten years of bad decisions is the usual click bait for all the MS-Haters which is why this article appears on Slashdot.
Don't get me wrong, I am no fan of Microsoft, but one has to realize that end consumers with Windows they could care less about - and this has been the case since the company grew up. Microsoft's support for the Fortune 100 client is absolutely spectacular... I've experienced it first hand.
Absolutely correct. IE is a lot like M$ Outlook. One asks the question "How in the hell can you need a binary image that big, and consume that much memory, just to give me a simple grid of my emails and a fucking calendar?"
Because we create Web Sites for public consumption I often find myself doing final client acceptance testing with Chrome, FireFox, Safari, and IE all running at the same time, Windows is practically crushed on a 3 year old premium desktop by this.... Which is just wrong:-)
Yes, but it's not the average user's fault, it's the M$ corporate OEM agreements. We recently had a major client FINALLY upgrade. From the worst IE ever, 9, to an almost as bad piece of shit 10. When asked, the CIO explained that with 22,000 workstations they could only afford to upgrade 1 revision...
Clearly you don't deal with clients in any meaningful way. And by clients I mean people who pay the billls...
ADVERTISING is what the majority of public websites are... People sit in rooms for hours and hours and discuss the shades of this color, or that color (Can't we make the red redder? And the black, it's just too dark). And then the client pays an exorbitant amount of money for the "comp" which is a fancy name for a JPG file, and when they get the website it damn well better look EXACTLY like the comp, even if the CEO has IE8, or it will be the Spanish Inquisition. The creative people drive. We techies sit in the back of the room and try to prevent the website from being too slow, or dampening expectations about what is actually possible inside a browser.
Don't get me wrong, I love this business and all the personalities in it. But once you get into the "public web" you're creating advertising, not programming, and you either adapt to that mindset or you are left in the dust. The buzzword is "pixel perfect". And if you blow it, the creative director will open the website in every single browser, and measure each element, comparing it against the layers in the PSD. And if it doesn't match perfectly, if the style guide calls for a 20 degree radius button corner, and it's 21%, it will be the Spanish Inquisition, and you'll be looking for a job in traditional I.T. again.
You want to create things that millions of people see, that's what you do.
Absolutely but you left out "The first try will be pure crap, the second pretty good, and after that it will pretty much be hated by all Web developers young and old."
The cry of "Put the Astronauts in Charge" is as old as the Mercury program. The plain truth is that NASA needs to be scrapped, and we need to start over with a new agency that has a MISSION. Today, it's a jobs program who's main function is coming up with reasons to keep the budget increases in place year after year, and it's not doing that great of a job at that.
This should be written in to EVERY FEDERAL AGENCY, that after so many years, they are disbanded, the paperwork shredded, and we just start over.
This is exactly what happens in Corporations when they suffer big losses, or get acquired. It is a natural, evolutionary cleansing process that governments never do... It's a big part of the reason we have such an alarming deficit... All government agencies are on an auto-pilot growth program - that has nothing at all do with RESULTS and everything to do with getting funds in the congressional district that pays for the contributions to the politician's PAC.
To think back at the vitriolic hate that was thrown at Dubya.... He was a stupid buffoon, an ignorant hayseed, a country cowboy... And then we got "The smartest man ever elected to the office" and he turned into an even bigger buffoon with his incessant need to be in the press, on TV, his picture plastered everywhere, all the time, for no reason other than to highlight HIM and his latest action, no matter how trivial.
Surely the next Zaphod Beeblebrox we elect won't go on Oprah, or the Tonight Show, or make a story out of every little thing he does, no matter how stupid it is... He or She will act... well... Presidential. It's no wonder the world is laughing at us and ignoring us these days. How can you take this guy seriously? Clearly he walks around all day thinking Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Look at me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me... It's embarrassing.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod up 100. More folks like you need to speak out.
First of all the taxes in Germany are quite a bit higher than ours. Second, we Americans are corrupt to the bone, and most of the costs in the things you mention go into greedy pockets, as opposed to actually delivering the services. This is because we've decided that it should cost insane amounts of money to get elected, therefore requiring that politicians raise exorbitant sums of money. Once they get elected, they write laws that benefit the people who gave them money, which in any other system would be considered a crime, but not here!
One party just lies about everything. They claim they care so much about the poor and downtrodden, but in reality they are greedy and corrupt beyond belief and do the exact opposite once elected. The other party doesn't hide the fact that they suck up to big business, but claim they are the party of small government, and when they get elected they do the exact opposite. The people wanting to clean the system up, they are declared radical, ignorant, dangerous terrorists - by both sides. Of course the majority of us actually want the system cleaned up, but we are gullible folk over here, and are easily distracted.
And there is a large number of people who have given up, don't give a shit, and are just trying to get by. They only come out and vote if they are really pissed off, and when that happens we get "change" which always turns out to not be change at all....
I absolutely agree, but as the owner of a development company that listens to start up entrepreneur pitches this is not a plan for everybody.
There is a huge freelance market place for responsible, hard working, decent honest folk. I'll never have a "real job" again, ever, and I make more money now than I ever made working for someone else.
There's a fantasy out there that there is VC money flowing like water for every Internet based idea. There isn't. But services, so many of the independent contractors are really flaky, there is a huge opportunity... in every market.
The way funding works in the new world as cemented by Citizen's United (Which benefited both Democrats and Republicans equally despite the wailing from the Democrats) is something like this:
Hello Mega-Evil-Corp? This is your friendly neighborhood party apparatchik. I'm prepared to offer you an exorbitant sum of the people's money, but you have to agree to "donate" a percentage of that money to our favorite super-pac. Don't worry, we fixed it so nobody can ever know! Mega-Evil-Corp does a financial analysis, and if the numbers look good, they accept. Next, the Party's central command pays some high dollar PR agency on K Street to craft the spin, and then an executive decision is made as to which lie, er, messaging will be used to sell this latest money laundering and/or vote buying scheme. The groundswell contingent gets their talking points, and they flood the comment sections of the news sites, the lies are honed and turned into heart tugging stories, and if it's a lot of money a fake crisis is precipitated behind the scenes. And then the money flows, the votes get bought, the wheels of the engine spin. Everybody makes out like a bandit except for YOU, the taxpayer, you get screwed beyond screwing. When it's all said and done, a few years later, the numbers come in and the whole thing was a colossal boondoggle, but this is quickly swept under the rug and nobody wants to talk about it anyway.
So one of the early actions of the greediest administration yet was to "privatize" space exploration. Wonder why? I just explained it to you. It's win win for everybody, the wheel of blame is off the government (Right: Look! That thing blew up! This proves big government doesn't work!). The wheel of blame is entirely on the private sector, which DUH benefits the left they cut the deals initially and just look who they picked to be the winners, certainly not evil Rethugnican companies DUH. If it fails, they can swoop in and use the crisis to great an even more giant theft engine, and if it doesn't, they can steal taxpayer money using PAC donations. It is so win win - and as usual science, technology, the advancement of the species, well who gives a shit about that when there is money to be made!!!
This is how ALL the schemes work, and have always worked, be it HealthCare, the Environment, Alternative Energy, Fracking, Drilling, Military Spending, Roads, Bridges, Infrastructure, Education, Public works projects, the border fence, you name it. So keep arguing stupid ideology folks, and pretend that your thieving party is so superior to the other thieving party, that's exactly what they want you to do... What I am describing is how the real world works, whether you like it or not, there's more truth to what I am saying than fiction.
Agreed but the Politicans are just as guilty as rebranding the same old shit under a new and improved name and then pretending it's new....
Cuba is a civilized country? Previt Tovarich! I hope your handlers pay you well.
Yes, this is a sarcastic comment. And you deserve it.
But this isn't what happens at all. In the real world governments steal from one program to pay for another one that stands a greater chance of getting today's politician elected. So they drive the payments to providers to the lowest possible level, resulting in all customers getting the absolute lowest level of service. Corporations are beholden to their stockholders. So they offer different levels of service at different prices, because that's what the market wants, but at the end of the day they have to make a profit (e.g. provide an adequate return on the investment made by the stockholders) or they go under.
In the real world government is all about grabbing the maximum amount of money to buy the most votes for the party in power, because they want to stay there. Which is why the other party is ALWAYS portrayed as evil beyond evil. So of course they want you to believe that the competition is heartless and evil, duh. Corporations are not inherently evil, but they are far more predictable...
What you have do is not be swayed by the emotion targeted marketing that both groups use against ignorant people with great effectiveness. Politics is sales and marketing, they are one and the same. To pretend that one form of sales and marketing is evil, and one is benevolent, is very naive...
I was completely with you until you implied there's a distinction between the hackers and Harry the scumbag CEO. Hacking itself has become a business.
How do I know this?
Because we run a farm of web servers, and because we're small we take on all kinds of clients. Some of them have politically sensitive and/or controversial content. And no, we don't host porn sites. Anyway, a few of these sites have come under attack that is clearly the work of a human, not a robot. Given the time they invested, and some of the real time fights we had with them, these folks are clearly getting paid, nobody spends days and days harassing a web site across a dozen or more proxy servers just for fun.
As to marketing weasels being scumbags, yeah, but they are a necessary evil, no sales, no paycheck, no time to post on slashdot, ya know?
You make very good points. I believe there are additional aspects to this - There is a shrinking quantity of leisure time, combined with new perceptions of how one should spend it.
I started working in 1979. One got up, went to work, put in an eight, nine hour day and that was it. The only time you ever got called from work after hours was if the office was unexpectedly closed the next day. A very few, very important people had "pagers", and sure, the owner/senior management were taking client calls at all hours, but 97% of the workforce actually stopped working at 5:00. This is no longer the case for any position above store clerk, or mechanic. The expectation now is that work is the center of your life, and that you are always available. In those days workers were partly defined by their career and partly by their hobbies. Today, it's all about the career.
It used to be that building something in one's garage, restoring an old something, working on some artful thing - these were prized leisure activities. These activities were celebrated in the media, and on TV shows. While plenty of people still do these things, popular media says you should be always striving to better yourself - and that if you're not doing this, you should feel terribly guilty You should be working out, donating your free time to the soup kitchen, growing your own organic food, or something really huge like climbing half dome using one arm. That's whats celebrated by the media now. So being in one's garage building a boat or restoring a car, why that's selfish! So no wonder if you survey people, they are going to say "Oh yes, I spend my free time helping poor people and protesting the evils of capitalism" as opposed to what they probably really do...Play Video games, get stoned, watch TV....
To the article's point I believe it's hogwash, I know plenty of young folks, some of them aren't mechanical and some aren't. That's the way it always has been.
Virtual file system support to Linux boxes with Windows (server or client) is HORRIBLE, sure they claim to support WebDAV but as one who has tried it it falls apart the second the files are large, and the servers are not on the same intranet. I think they do this on purpose to sell SharePoint which is, of course ShareCraptastik.
MS can't even create a decent FTP client, which is pretty absurd when you think about it.
A foreign born non U.S. citizen can open a U.S. bank account without any problems at all, they just have to show up in person to do it. They can get a debit card issued against that account, no problem at all. The only bank that I am aware of that refuses to do this on a regular basis is CHASE but that's because of operation chokepoint (and Chase's participation in it).
It's much, much harder to get a credit card because of how charge back protection works. But what's wrong with a debit card? Nothing....
The daily climate clickbait has the normal count - close to 500 posts - all the same people, making the same arguments.
God God Slashdot is the CPI revenue that fucking important that you have to run this crap every 2 days?? Color me sick to death of it. So let's run a pro Obama Care story tomorrow (500 posts assured), followed by some "Corporations are Evil" story (500 posts assured), outsourcing I.T. jobs (500 posts, assured), followed by the ever popular "My I.T. manager is a clueless dolt" (500 posts every time)......
That was the office I started working in as a programmer in 1979. No kidding. What's left of of the picture are the 12" ashtrays and the brown walls, because ALL programmers smoked, every single one of them. One had a lot of time on their hands waiting for compiles, editor saves, 'n such in those days.
I hear what you are saying, I really do. But as a developer turned manager part of the reason things end up so black and white is because as a manager what you basically do is field complaints from the users (clients, other departments, your bosses) and the development staff day in and day out, day after day, endlessly. And life becomes, essentially, a constant stream of fuck ups, dumb mistakes, omissions. Because when things go well, managers aren't needed.
After a while you realize that you can't please everybody, no matter what, and that is how you end up with so much black and white.
For example... five of the twenty developers that work for you bitch and complain that their changes keep getting over-written when source code forks merge.. When the real problem is that they aren't good source control users and are too lazy to get a fresh copy... or commit. Or they click "auto merge" and never bother to pull the auto-merged code back down and see that it works. Five other guys complain about the first five... Your boss goes ballistic every time there's a new release because old bugs come back. After a while you get sick of the endless complaining. So you decide that the real problem is the developers aren't talking to each other, so you end up with the "daily tactical merge meeting" which is seen by the really good developers as a stupid waste of time.... And then people don't show up, in a childish act of rebellion... and you have to make it "mandatory". This is what it's like on the dark side... I do try really hard NOT to be the PHB I always seemed to work for as a developer but sometimes I do find myself acting like one.
As to the work space layout I do believe the low height cube walls are a huge mistake for most environments but I do see them more and more - and it's better than everybody having desks lined up in rows, which is what we had when I first started working a very long time ago.
I hear ya. The thing is, Exchange Server is pretty slick, it does things that IMAP doesn't. It's the suck-ass bloatware that is the client that's the issue...
For example I have a desktop, a laptop I take to meetings, and an iPad. IMAP can synch the inbox... Exchange synchs the sent items folder. Which is really useful... if you're 100 miles from your desktop and needing to find an email you sent this morning while in the office.
Although I think Outlook's main selling point is that Lotus notes sucks even more LOL. Gmail's OK except that I use open windows email as my task list sometimes...
Microsoft basically had two profitable divisions windows and office.
Largest clients for Microsoft are the U.S. Military and the Fortune 100. They have serviced these clients quite well. To claim they have made ten years of bad decisions is the usual click bait for all the MS-Haters which is why this article appears on Slashdot.
Don't get me wrong, I am no fan of Microsoft, but one has to realize that end consumers with Windows they could care less about - and this has been the case since the company grew up. Microsoft's support for the Fortune 100 client is absolutely spectacular... I've experienced it first hand.
Absolutely correct. IE is a lot like M$ Outlook. One asks the question "How in the hell can you need a binary image that big, and consume that much memory, just to give me a simple grid of my emails and a fucking calendar?"
:-)
Because we create Web Sites for public consumption I often find myself doing final client acceptance testing with Chrome, FireFox, Safari, and IE all running at the same time, Windows is practically crushed on a 3 year old premium desktop by this.... Which is just wrong
Yes, but it's not the average user's fault, it's the M$ corporate OEM agreements. We recently had a major client FINALLY upgrade. From the worst IE ever, 9, to an almost as bad piece of shit 10. When asked, the CIO explained that with 22,000 workstations they could only afford to upgrade 1 revision...
Have you seen the memory these things gobble?
Clearly you don't deal with clients in any meaningful way. And by clients I mean people who pay the billls...
ADVERTISING is what the majority of public websites are... People sit in rooms for hours and hours and discuss the shades of this color, or that color (Can't we make the red redder? And the black, it's just too dark). And then the client pays an exorbitant amount of money for the "comp" which is a fancy name for a JPG file, and when they get the website it damn well better look EXACTLY like the comp, even if the CEO has IE8, or it will be the Spanish Inquisition. The creative people drive. We techies sit in the back of the room and try to prevent the website from being too slow, or dampening expectations about what is actually possible inside a browser.
Don't get me wrong, I love this business and all the personalities in it. But once you get into the "public web" you're creating advertising, not programming, and you either adapt to that mindset or you are left in the dust. The buzzword is "pixel perfect". And if you blow it, the creative director will open the website in every single browser, and measure each element, comparing it against the layers in the PSD. And if it doesn't match perfectly, if the style guide calls for a 20 degree radius button corner, and it's 21%, it will be the Spanish Inquisition, and you'll be looking for a job in traditional I.T. again.
You want to create things that millions of people see, that's what you do.
Absolutely but you left out "The first try will be pure crap, the second pretty good, and after that it will pretty much be hated by all Web developers young and old."
The cry of "Put the Astronauts in Charge" is as old as the Mercury program. The plain truth is that NASA needs to be scrapped, and we need to start over with a new agency that has a MISSION. Today, it's a jobs program who's main function is coming up with reasons to keep the budget increases in place year after year, and it's not doing that great of a job at that.
This should be written in to EVERY FEDERAL AGENCY, that after so many years, they are disbanded, the paperwork shredded, and we just start over.
This is exactly what happens in Corporations when they suffer big losses, or get acquired. It is a natural, evolutionary cleansing process that governments never do... It's a big part of the reason we have such an alarming deficit... All government agencies are on an auto-pilot growth program - that has nothing at all do with RESULTS and everything to do with getting funds in the congressional district that pays for the contributions to the politician's PAC.
Mod up 1,000,000
To think back at the vitriolic hate that was thrown at Dubya.... He was a stupid buffoon, an ignorant hayseed, a country cowboy... And then we got "The smartest man ever elected to the office" and he turned into an even bigger buffoon with his incessant need to be in the press, on TV, his picture plastered everywhere, all the time, for no reason other than to highlight HIM and his latest action, no matter how trivial.
Surely the next Zaphod Beeblebrox we elect won't go on Oprah, or the Tonight Show, or make a story out of every little thing he does, no matter how stupid it is... He or She will act... well... Presidential. It's no wonder the world is laughing at us and ignoring us these days. How can you take this guy seriously? Clearly he walks around all day thinking Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Look at me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me... It's embarrassing.
Please Google something called a W8-BEN and get back to us, OK? You are dead wrong in your assumption.